Edward W. Said
         Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community
         I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural
            situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies
            Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred
            back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a
            particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not
            merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of
            thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era.
            Moreover, I think, "criticism" and the traditional academic
            humanities have gone through a series of developments over time
            whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross
            claims that I make for my argument.
            A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully
            aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment
            is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst.
            But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in
            which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a
            totality felt to be benign (free, apolitical, serious),
            uncharacterizable as a whole (it is too complex to be described in
            general and tendentious terms) and somehow outside history. Thus it
            seems to me that one thing to be tried out of sheer critical
            obstinacy is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind
            of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the
            present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from
            the start.
            It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make
            invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist
            between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the
            world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military
            force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for
            example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive (as
            opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of noninterference
            among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general
            public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions
            affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists
            who talk about their specialty only, and to use the word
            first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public
            Opinion and The Phantom Public "insiders," people (usually
            men) who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how
            things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.
            1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century
            (Boston, 1980), pp. 180-85 and 212-6.
Donald A. Davie
         Poet: Patriot: Interpreter
         If patriotism can thus be seen as an incentive or as an instigation
            even in such a recondite science as epistemology, how much more
            readily can it be seen to perform such functions in other studies
            more immediately or inextricably bound up with communal human life?
            I pass over instances that occur to me for instance, the
            Victorian Jesuit, Father Hopkins, declaring (too shrilly tor modern
            susceptibilities) that every good poem written by an Englishman was
            a blow struck for England--and profit instead, if I may, by the
            presence among us of Edward Said. I do not know, and it is none of
            my business to know, what passport Said presents at the
            international frontier. But it is surely common knowledge among us
            that he has deep and feelingful and intimate allegiances to the
            state of Lebanon. Who of us has failed to connect this with his
            books Orientalism and The Question of Palestine? The point is that,
            having made this connection, none of us thinks the worse of Said.
            On the contrary, we recognize that he has a special stake in such
            topics and therefore speaks on them with a special authority.
            Unless I am mistaken, that stake and that authority are, in a
            perhaps extended sense, patriotic. And whatever our speculative
            objections to the idea and the principle of patriotism, in practice
            we recognize it and we honour it.
            What I am questioning, it will now be plain, is the principle of
            "disinterest." "The disinterested pursuit of knowledge" it is
            what in our distinct disciplines all of us have paid lip-service
            to, and perhaps more than lip-service. But when we come right down
            to it, is it what we believe? The honest patriot declares an
            interest; and if we are wise, we take note of the declaration,
            making allowances and reserving doubts accordingly. But what are we
            to make of the scholar who declares no interest, who claims
            implicitly to be truly disinterested. Can we believe him? And if we
            cannot, what guidance do we have as to what reservations to make,
            what doubts to entertain? I am of one mind with my Marxist
            colleagues who, from a political position very far from mine, warn
            us to be especially suspicious of the scholar who claims to have no
            axe to grind. We, all of us, have axes to grind; the crucial
            distinction is between those who know this about themselves and
            those who don't.
            Let me make myself clear. When I urge that the terms "patriotism"
            and "patriotic" be reinstated in our discourse, and particularly in
            those forms of our discourse that may be called "interpretation," I
            do not imply that patriotism is a nobler, a more elevated
            instigation than sundry others, mostly ideological, of which we are
            more aware. The point is precisely that of these others we are
            aware because we share a vocabulary which acknowledges them,
            whereas "patriotic" has been banished from our vocabulary, and so
            the reality which the word represents is left out of our
            calculations. Let me admit for the sake of argument what I do not
            in fact believe-- that patriotism is a concept and a sentiment so
            besmirched by the unholy uses made of it that, if mankind is to
            survive, patriotism will have to be eradicated. Even if that were
            the case, it remains true that patriotic interest and incitement
            are very far from having been eradicated from the world that we in
            fact inhabit, and try to interpret, here and now; and if we try to
            work within a vocabulary that pretends otherwise, we condemn
            ourselves to producing interpretations that are drastically partial
            and perhaps disastrously misleading. The point is not whether
            patriotism is a good thing or a bad thing but simply that it is; it
            exists, as powerful factor which we all in our hearts acknowledge
            even as our vocabulary refuses to. And when we speak in this
            context of "the world," we certainly include in that world
            ourselves, who offer to interpret it. Every one of our
            interpretations is coloured by the fact that we, the several
            interpreters, are British or American, French or Italian or Russian
            or whatever. If we think otherwise, we deceive ourselves; and yet
            where, in any of our currently acceptable vocabularies, determined
            as all of them are by the glib rationalism of the Enlightenment, do
            we find that momentous fact about ourselves acknowledged? Where is
            it acknowledged, for instance, in the vocabulary of feminism that
            "woman," as conceived by an American writing about Italians, cannot
            help but be significantly different from "woman" as conceived by an
            Italian looking at Americans? Or again, an Italian woman may well,
            we must suppose, be an Italian patriot; but where, in the current
            vocabulary of feminists, is that dimension of her "woman-ness"
            allowed for? Let it be acknowledged only so as to be deplored; but
            let it in any event be acknowledged. At the moment, it isn't.
            Donald A. Davie, the distinguished poet, is Andrew W. Mellon
            Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and honorary
            fellow of Saint Catharine's College, Cambridge and of Trinity
            College, Dublin. He has edited The New Oxford Book of Christian
            Verse, and his Collected Poems 1950-1970 appeared in 1972. His
            latest publications are Dissentient Voice and These the Companions;
            Recollections.
Wayne C. Booth
         Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of_Feminist
            Criticism
         In turning to the language of freedom, I am not automatically freed
            from the dangers of reduction and self-privileging. "Freedom" as a
            term is at least as ambiguous as "power" (or as "politics" or
            "interpretation"). When I say that for me all questions about the
            politics of interpretation begin with the question of freedom, I
            can either be saying a mouthful or saying nothing at all, depending
            on whether I am willing to complicate my key term, "freedom," by
            relating it to the language of power. The best way to do that is to
            get power in from the beginning, by making a distinction taken for
            granted by many earlier thinkers and too often ignored today:
            freedom from as contrasted with freedom to; freedom fromexternal
            restraints and the power of others to inhibit our actions, and
            freedom to act effectively when restraints disappear.
            All the freedom from in the world will not free me to make an
            intellectual discovery or to point a picture unless I have somehow
            freed myself to perform certain tasks. Such freedoms are gained
            only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by
            others, giving up certain freedoms from. Nobody forbids by
            interpreting the original text of Confucius' Analects or the
            Principia Mathematica, yet I am not free to do so, lacking the
            disciplines having not been disciplined to do so. The
            distinction can lead to troublesome complexities, but in its simple
            form here it cuts through some of the problems that arise in power
            language.
            Every critical revolution tends to speak more clearly about what it
            is against than about what it seeks. The historicists against
            impressionism, the New Critics against historicism, the new new
            critics against intentionalism and the authority of canons, the
            feminists against misogynous art and criticism clearly one
            could write a history of modern criticism as a glorious casting off
            of errors. But it is rightly a commonplace among intellectual
            historians that all revolutionaries depend on their past far more
            than they know. Revolutionary critics are enslaved by a nasty law
            of nature: I can say only what I can say, and that will be largely
            what I have learned to say from the kings I would depose.
            Everyone who tries to forge any kind of ideological criticism must
            struggle with these complexities. Nobody ever knows just what
            powers have been rejected and what voices heard. But at the moment
            it seems clear that what follows here, both in its emerging
            clarities and remaining confusions, results from my somewhat
            surprised surrender to voices previously alien to me: the "Mikhail
            Bakhtin" who speaks to me, muffled by my ignorance of Russian, and
            the feminist criticism" that in its vigor and diversity and
            challenge to canonic views has belatedly,
            belatedly forced me to begin listening.
            Wayne C. Booth's most recent work, Critical Understanding: The
            Powers and Limits of Pluralism, won the Laing Prize in 1982. He is
            working on a book about ethical and political criticism of
            narrative. A new edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction will appear in
            1983.
Julia Kristeva
         Psychoanalysis and the Polis
         The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now
            was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps
            American university discourse in particular, possesses an
            extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the
            key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a
            fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States,
            though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a
            fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian
            Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian "deconstructivism"
            though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to
            analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through
            contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems
            consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness:
            psychoanalysis not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to
            implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as
            that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic
            decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of
            language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring
            here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and,
            perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event (après
            coup).
            For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed
            throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as
            strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same
            preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and
            "revolutionaries" in all cases, jealous guardians of their
            academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into
            question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would
            therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:
            1. There are political implications inherent in the act of
            interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation
            bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the
            interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give
            meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is
            perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological
            attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning.
            This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the
            speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his
            identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the
            apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.
            2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a
            fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and
            dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs
            to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an
            uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a
            situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget
            that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic
            intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an
            antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to
            become our modern religion: the final explanation.
            3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two
            powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel
            to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as
            well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a
            meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that
            context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts
            insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an
            example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.
            Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris
            VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the
            author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and
            Art and About Chinese Women.
            Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia
            University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du
            langage poétique.
Stephen Toulmin
         The Construal of Reality: Criticism in Modern and_Postmodern
            Science
         The hermeneutic movement in philosophy and criticism has done us a
            service by directing our attention to the role of critical
            interpretation in understanding the humanities. But it has done us
            a disservice also because it does not recognize any comparable role
            for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply
            separates the two fields of scholarship and experience.1
            Consequently, I shall argue, the central truths and virtues of
            hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false
            interferences and misleading dichotomies. These distortions have
            had two effects. On the one hand, they have rationality which are
            crucial goals of the natural sciences; and, on the other hand, they
            have encouraged an exaggerated idea of the extent to which
            difference in personal and/or cultural standpoint rule out any such
            goal for the humanities. Once we recognize that the natural
            sciences too are in the business of "construing" reality, we shall
            be better able to preserve the central insights of the hermeneutic
            method, without succumbing to the misleading implications of its
            rhetorical misuse.
            Physics, in particular, has always required its participants to
            adopt an interpretive standpoint, and this standpoint has changed
            more than once during the historical development of that science.
            Yet this variable standpoint has done nothing to undercut the
            commitment of physicists to rationality and objectivity: on the
            contrary, they have made it one of their chief aims to discover
            just what aspects of reality, or nature, lend themselves to
            interpretation and understanding as considered from any particular
            standpoint. If we can drive this wedge between scientific
            objectivity and hermeneutic relativity in the case of physics, we
            are free to return to the humanities and apply the same distinction
            there too. It has too often, and too readily, been assumed that
            whatever needs to be interpreted in order to be understood will, to
            that extent, become a matter of taste or subjectivity; and, as a
            result, any claims to rationality and objectivity in the critical
            realms whether moral or aesthetic, political and
            intellectual have been too hastily surrendered.
            The current sharp distinction between scientific explanations and
            hermeneutic interpretation was launched by Wilhelm Dilthey nearly a
            century ago; and, in justice to Dilthey, we need to bear in mind
            that the interpretive element in natural science was far less
            evident then than it is today. Scientists nowadays view the world
            from a new and less rigid standpoint. This period which Frederick
            Ferre calls "postmodern science," differs from the older one of
            "modern science" in just those respects that enable us to reconcile
            the rational claims that have always been central to the natural
            sciences with a new hermeneutic richness and variability.
            1. Some will respond that Edmund Husserl, for one, spoke of the
            natural sciences as being, in their own way, "interpretive"; but
            the role allotted to natural science by the phenomonologists and
            their successors I have in mind Hans Georg Gadamer and Jürgen
            Habermass much as Martin Heidegger and Husserl I an
            impoverished and unhistorical one. The hermeneutic philosophers
            have not, in this respect, fully recognized either the plurality or
            the historical variability of the interpretive modes adopted in one
            or another of the natural sciences for different intellectual
            purposes and at different stages in their historical development.
            Stephen Toulmin is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought,
            the Department of Philosophy, and the Divinity School at the
            University of Chicago. He is author of, among other works,
            Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, and Knowing and
            Acting and is currently at work on volume 2 of Human Understanding.
            His previous contribution to , "The Inwardness of
            Mental Life," appeared in the Autumn 1979 issue.
Hayden White
         The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-
            Sublimation
         The politics of interpretation should not be confused with
            interpretive practices such as political theory, political
            commentary, or histories of political institutions, parties, and
            conflicts that have politics itself as a specific object of
            interest. In these other interpretive practices, the politics that
            informs or motivates them "politics" in the sense
            of political values or ideology is relatively easily
            perceived and no particular meta-interpretive analysis is required.
            The politics of interpretation, on the other hand, arises in those
            interpretive practices which are ostensibly most remote from
            overtly political concerns, practices which are carried out under
            the aegis of a purely disinterested search for the truth or inquiry
            into the natures of things which appear to have no political
            relevance at all. This "politics" has to do with the
            kind of authority the interpreter claims vis-à-vis the established
            political authorities of his society, on the one side, and vis-à-
            vis other interpreters in his own field of study or investigation,
            on the other, as the basis of whatever rights he conceives himself
            to possess and whatever duties he feels obligated to discharge as a
            professional seeker of truth. This politics which presides over
            interpretive conflicts is difficult to identity because
            traditionally, in our culture at least, interpretation is thought
            to operate properly only as long as the interpreter does not have
            recourse to the one instrument which the politician per vocationem
            utilizes as a matter of course in his practice the appeal to
            force as a means of resolving disputes and conflicts.1
            1. I have followed the lead of Max Weber in defining the phrase
            "politics of interpretation." In "Politics as
            Vocation," Weber wrote that " &lsquo;politics'
            means for us striving to share power or striving to influence the
            distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a
            state" (From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,ed. and trans. H.
            H. Gerth and C. W. Mills [New York, 1958], p. 78). Rather than
            discuss the age-old problem of the professional interpreter's
            political responsibilities, I will consider that politics which is
            endemic to the pursuit of truth the striving to share power
            amongst interpreters themselves. The activity of interpreting
            becomes political at the point where a given interpreter claims
            authority over rival interpreters. As long as this claim is not
            reinforced by appeal to the power of the state to compel conformity
            of belief or conviction, it is "political" only in a
            metaphorical sense. Of course, interpretation becomes political
            when a given point of view or finding is taken as orthodoxy of
            belief by those holding political power, as in the Soviet Union,
            Germany under Hitler, or any number of religiously puritanical
            regimes. But these are the easy cases. It is much more difficult to
            determine the political nature of interpretive practices which, as
            in literary criticism or antiquarian scholarship, appear to have no
            bearing upon political policies or practices.
            Hayden White is a professor and director of the program in the
            history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa
            Cruz. He is coeditor of Representing Kenneth Burke (forthcoming
            this fall) and is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of
            realism. His previous contributions to  are "The
            Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (Autumn
            1980) and "The Narrativization of Real Events" (Summer 1981).
T. J. Clark
         Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art
         It is not intended as some sort of revelation on my part that
            Greenberg's cultural theory was originally Marxist in its stresses
            and, indeed in its attitude to what constituted explanation in such
            matters. I point out the Marxist and historical mode of proceeding
            as emphatically as I do partly because it may make my own procedure
            later in this paper seem a little less arbitrary. For I shall fall
            to arguing in the end with these essay's Marxism and their history,
            and I want it understood that I think that to do so is to take
            issue with their strengths and their main drift.
            But I have to admit there are difficulties here. The essays in
            question ["Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Lacoön"]
            are quite brief. They are, I think, extremely well written: it was
            not for nothing the Partisan Review described Clement Greenberg,
            when he first contributed to the journal early in 1939, as "a young
            writer who works in the New York customs house" fine,
            redolent avant-garde pedigree, that! The language of these articles
            is forceful and easy, always straightforward, blessedly free from
            Marxist conundrums. Yet the price paid for such lucidity, here as
            so often, is a degree of inexplicitness certain amount of
            elegant skirting round the difficult issues, where one might
            otherwise be obliged to call out the ponderous armory of Marx's
            concepts and somewhat spoil the low of the prose from one firm
            statement to another. The Marxism, in other words, is quite largely
            implicit; it is stated on occasion, with brittle and pugnacious
            finality, as the essay's frame of reference, but it remains to the
            reader to determine just how it works in the history and theory
            presented what that history and theory depend on, in the way
            of Marxist assumptions about class and capital or even abase and
            superstructure. That is what I intend to do in this paper: to
            interpret and extrapolate from the texts, even at the risk of
            making their Marxism declare itself more stridently than the "young
            writer" seems to have wished. And I should admit straight away that
            there are several point in what follows where I am genuinely
            uncertain as to whether I am diverging from Greenberg's argument or
            explaining it more fully. This does not worry me overmuch, as long
            as we are alerted to the special danger in this case, dealing with
            such transparent yet guarded prose, and as long as we can agree
            that the project in general pressing home a Marxist reading
            of texts which situate themselves within the Marxist
            tradition is a reasonable one.2
            2. This carelessness distinguishes the present paper from two
            recent studies of Greenberg's early writings, Serge Guilbaut's "The
            New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," October 15 (Winter
            1980), and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock's "Avant-Gardes and
            Partisans Reviewed," Art History 3 (September 1981) I am indebted
            to both these essays and am sure that their strictures on the
            superficiality not to say the opportunism of
            Greenberg's Marxism are largely right. (Certainly Mr. Greenberg
            would not now disagree with them.) But I am nonetheless interested
            in the challenge offered to most Marxist, and non-Marxist, accounts
            of modern history by what I take to be a justified though extreme,
            pessimism as t the nature of established culture since 1870. That
            pessimism is characteristic, I suppose, of what Marxists call an
            ultraleftist point of view. I believe, as I say, that a version of
            some such view is correct and would therefore with to treat
            Greenberg's theory as if it were a decently elaborated Marxism of
            an ultraleftist kind, on which issues in certain mistaken views
            (which I criticize) but which need not so issue and which might
            still provide, cleansed of those errors, a good vantage for a
            history of our culture.
            T. J. Clark, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the
            author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France,
            1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
            Revolution. His book on impressionist painting and Paris is
            forthcoming.
Stanley Cavell
         Politics as Opposed to What?
         In my essay on Austin I did not specify what I took the politics of
            my own discourse to be, but the institutional pressures on it, in
            particular the pressures of the professionalization of American
            philosophy, were in outline clear enough. I was more and more
            galled by the mutual shunning of the continental and the Anglo-
            American traditions of philosophizing, and I was finding more and
            more oppressive the mutual indifference of philosophy and
            literature to one another, especially, I suppose, of American
            philosophy and American literature, and especially philosophy's
            indifference to the literary conditions of its own existence. (I
            understand this to imply not an interdisciplinary wish but rather a
            wish for philosophy to take a further step toward itself.) I was
            still near the beginning of what is turning out to be a lifelong
            quarrel with the profession of philosophy. One of its recent
            manifestations has been the question put to me by certain
            professional colleagues whether I do not take satisfaction from the
            newer literary theory and criticism, especially as that has been
            inspired by developments over the past fifteen or so years in
            French intellectual life. This would seem to answer my plea at one
            stroke for both continental philosophy and for an understanding
            with literary matters. The fact is that my ambivalence toward these
            developments has been so strong, or anyway periodic, that I have
            found it difficult to study in any very orderly way.
            The reason for my difficulty is contained in what I mean by my
            quarrel with the profession of philosophy. That this is a quarrel
            means that I recognize the profession to be the genuine present of
            the impulse and the history of philosophy, so far as that present
            takes its place in our (English-speaking) public intellectual life.
            This is what makes my quarrel with it a part of what I take my
            intellectual adventure to be. My point in the quarrel is that I can
            recognize no expression of mine to be philosophical which simply
            thinks to escape my profession's paradigms of comprehensibility; so
            that the invocations of the name of philosophy in current literary
            debate are frequently not comprehensible to me as calls upon
            philosophy. It may be that I should care less about this than I do,
            even less than my ambivalence asks. I mean to bear this in mind as
            I go on to spend the bulk of my time here considering in a
            practical way some passages from the writing of two literary
            theorists who have recourse to the work of Austin. In the case of
            the passages from Stanley Fish, it may be that my efforts will just
            amount to clearing up some unnecessarily confusing terminology;
            some passages from Paul de Man I find more troubling.
            Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of, among other works, Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            Senses of Walden, The Claim of Reason, and most recently Pursuits
            of Happiness. His previous contributions to  are
            "On Makavejev On Bergman" (Winter 1979), "A Reply to John
            Hollander" (Summer 1980), and "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981).
Ronald Dworkin
         Law as Interpretation
         The puzzle arises because propositions of law seem to be
            descriptive they are about how things are in the law, not
            about how they should be and yet it has proved extremely
            difficult to say exactly what it is that they describe. Legal
            positivists believe that propositions of law are indeed wholly
            descriptive: they are in fact pieces of history. A proposition of
            law in their view, is true just in case some event of a designated
            law-making kind has taken place, and other wise not. This seems to
            work reasonably well in very simple cases. If the Illinois
            legislature enacts the words "No will shall be valid without three
            witnesses, "then the proposition of law, that in Illinois will
            needs three witnesses, seems to be true only in virtue of that
            historical event.
            But in more difficult cases the analysis fails. Consider the
            proposition that a particular affirmative action scheme (not yet
            tested in the courts) is constitutionally valid. If that is true,
            it cannot be so just in virtue of the text of the Constitution and
            the fact of prior court decisions, because reasonable lawyers who
            know exactly what the constitution says and what the courts have
            done may yet disagree whether it is true. (I am doubtful that the
            positivist's analysis holds even in the simple case of the will;
            but that is a different matter I shall not argue here.)
            What are the other possibilities? One is to suppose that
            controversial propositions f law, like the affirmative action
            statement, are not descriptive at all but are rather expressions of
            what the speaker wants the law to be.
            Another is more ambitious: controversial statements are attempts to
            describe some pure objective or natural law, which exits in virtue
            of objective moral truth rather than historical decision. Both
            these projects take some legal statements, at least, to be purely
            evaluative as distinct from descriptive: they express either what
            the speaker prefers his personal politics or what he
            believes is objectively required b the principles of an ideal
            political morality. Neither of these projects is plausible because
            someone who says that a particular untested affirmative action plan
            is constitution does mean to describe the law as it is rather than
            as he wants it to be or thinks that, by the best moral theory, it
            should be. He might, indeed, say that the regrets that the plan is
            constitutional and thinks that, according to the best moral theory,
            it ought not to be.
            There is a better alternative: propositions of law are not simply
            descriptive of legal history, in a straightforward way, nor are
            they simply evaluative in some way divorced from legal history.
            They are interpretive of legal history, which combines elements of
            both description and evaluation but is different from both. This
            suggestion will be congenial, at least at first blush, to many
            lawyers and legal philosophers. They are used to saying that law is
            a matter of interpretation; but only, perhaps because they
            understand interpretation in a certain way. When a statute (or the
            Constitution) is unclear on some point, because some crucial term
            is vague or because a sentence is ambiguous, lawyers say that the
            statute must be interpreted, and they apply what they call
            "techniques of statutory construction." Most of the literature
            assumes that interpretation of a particular document is a matter of
            discovering what its authors (the legislators, or the delegates to
            the constitutional convention) meant to say in using the words they
            did. But lawyers recognize that on many issues the author had no
            intention either way and that on others his intention cannot be
            discovered. Some lawyers take a more skeptical position. They say
            that whenever judges pretend they are discovering the intention
            behind some piece of legislation, this is simply a smoke screen
            behind which the judges impose their own view of what the statute
            should have been.
            Ronald Dworkin, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, is
            the author of Taking Rights Seriously and editor of The Philosophy
            of Law.
